The most important week of the year for the OK Junior and OK Senior direct drive classes has come: the FIA World Championship will be held in Spain from 27th to 31st October at the Campillos racetrack. A total of 192 drivers will be racing there representing 44 nationalities. The largest category will be the Junior one with 112 registered drivers, while 80 of them will compete in the Senior. All the most important international karting teams will take part in the event and the show will be of the highest level, also thanks to the beautiful layout of the Spanish circuit, which includes many gradients and some very technical sections. The paddock in Campillos has been crowded for a week already: last weekend the 3rd round of the Champions of the Future took place here for the same categories and all drivers and teams took the opportunity to gain experience for next weekend’s race. .
The CRG Racing team is in Spain with 7 drivers: 3 in the OK Senior class and 4 in the OK Junior class. The data collected and last weekend’s performances were encouraging in the OK Senior category, where Brazilians Gabriel Gomez and Olin Galli did an excellent job, as well as Albany Del Valle, who gained a lot of experience in her first race with the official CRG Team. The weekend in OK Junior was more complicated, but many positive indications also came from this category and with the start of the free practice already on Wednesday, there will be time for the CRG drivers to find the best set up. As mentioned, there will be 4 CRG drivers in OK Junior: the Italian Simone Bianco, the Russian Gerasim Skulanov, the Panamanian Sebastian NG and the South African Nikolas Roos.
The FIA World Championship OK and & OKJ represents a key event in international karting for all those drivers who have the ambition to pursue professionalism in racing cars. This year it was initially scheduled in Brazil, but due to Covid, the FIA has decided to organize this important meeting in Europe, without depriving many of the protagonists of these two categories of the opportunity to take part in the race.
The event program is structured over 5 days on the track: Wednesday and Thursday dedicated to free practice, while from Friday with the qualifying practice, the race will officially start. The Finals are scheduled for Sunday afternoon and will be broadcast in Live Streaming on the FIA Karting website and on all the social channels of the International Federation.
CRG drivers’ expectations:
Gabriel Gomez (OK): “Last weekend we were very competitive, both in qualifying, making the most of the tires and getting the 3rd overall time, and with the” race pace” during the heats. Some contacts in the Pre-final and the Final did not give us the result we deserved, but the important thing is to have worked well in preparation for this weekend’s race and we are all confident of being able to achieve a good result”.
Olin Galli (OK): “We have worked a lot to prepare for this race, both in the testing sessions of two weeks ago and in the Champions of the Future. We believe we have a good technical base and in the two days of free practice that will open the World Championship we will have to work well to improve our “race pace.” CRG staff has a great deal of experience in these important international meetings and I am sure we will be competitive”.
Gerasim Skulanov (OKJ): “We tried a lot last weekend, but we often didn’t get the feedback we wanted and we partly believe that our problems came from some set of different performance tires, which we used between free practice and the race. We are analyzing the data in these two days off to better understand it, but certainly something did not work as it was supposed to. From the first free practice session this week we will hit the “reset” button and start all over to find our way back. Our place is among the 30 finalists and we have to get there”.
